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News Archive

2016

Graduate student Daniel Schwab and Professor Armin Moczek on the cover of the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: "Nutrient stress during ontogeny alters patterns of resource allocation in two species of horned beetles.
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cover/article
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McKinlay lab members Breah LaSarre (postdoc) and Ali McCully (graduate student) along with Associate Professor Jay Lennon and Assistant Professor Jake McKinlay published an article in The ISME Journal on how dose-dependent toxicity of cross-fed nutrients can affect the dynamics of a microbial mutualism.
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abstract
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Professor Volker Brendelhas been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a distinction that recognizes outstanding contributions to the progress of science and research. The AAAS citation of merit for Brendel reads: "For distinguished contributions to genomics and bioinformatics, particularly with respect to development of computational and cyberinfrastructure tools for analysis of plant genes and genomes."
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IU news release
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Graduate student Jolene Ramsey (Mukhopadhyay lab) and members of the IU proteomics mass spectrometry facility published an article in the Journal of Virology describing how a post-translational modification on the Sindbis virus TF protein regulates its cellular localization and subsequent incorporation into virions.
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abstract
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Postdoctoral research fellow Anthony Snyder and Associate Professor Pranav Danthi published an article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry describing how viral components co-opt the function of host membranes to facilitate virus entry into host cells.
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abstract
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Professor Emeritus David Dilcher, an eminent scholar in paleobotany, has been awarded the President's Medal of Excellence. Given to recognize exceptional distinction in public service, service to the university, achievement in a profession, or extraordinary merit and achievement in the arts, humanities, sciences, education, and industry—the medal is the highest honor an IU president can bestow.
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IU news release
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Adjunct Associate Professor Peter Hollenhorst and colleagues have found evidence that the molecular mechanism involved in the development of most prostate cancers is very similar to the molecular mechanism known to cause a rare form of cancer found in children, which suggests that the mechanism might be used to explore a common treatment for both diseases. GCDB graduate students Taylor Nicholas and Joshua Plotnik (Hollenhorst lab) contributed.
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IU news release | article
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News from the Brun lab: (1) Professor Yves Brun received a 4-year, $1.6 million grant from NIH to study how bacterial cell wall synthesis is controlled in order to produce different cell shapes and how different bacterial shapes evolve; (2) Postdocs David Kysela and Amelia Randish and graduate student Paul Caccamo in PLoS Biology about the diversity of bacterial shape; (3) Professors Yves Brun and Stephen Jacobson (Chemistry) received a 4-year, $1.1 million grant from NIH to study bacterial aging; and (4) C&E News featured a research article by graduate student Joshua Baker (Jacobson lab) and postdoc David Kysela about microfluidic devices to study how bacteria change over generations.
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PLoS article | C&EN article
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Research Associate Deepti Thete, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Anthony Snyder, Associate Professor Pranav Danthi, and collaborators published an article in the Journal of Virology describing the unexpected effects of exchange of genome segments between two different reovirus strains.
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abstract
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Themester topic for the Fall 2016 semester is Beauty.Distinguished Professor Roger Hangarter and Betsy Stirratt (Grunwald Gallery) share an idea of beauty as an experience found in nature as they discuss Hangarter's photograph of a spider web. They examine beauty as a phenomenon that inspires both scientists and artists.
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spider web podcast | "Beauty" podcast collection
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Associate Professor Rich Phillips among co-authors of "The increasing importance of atmospheric demand for ecosystem water and carbon fluxes" in Nature Climate Change in which researchers discuss that low relative humidity in the atmosphere is a significant, growing, and often under-appreciated cause of plant stress in hot, dry weather conditions.
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IU news release | article
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The team of Rich Phillips (associate professor of biology) and Kim Novick (assistant professor in SPEA) has been recognized with a 2016 Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award. Phillips and Novick will present "The breath of trees: interactions between eastern U.S. forests and the climate system" on Aug. 30.
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IU news release
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Congratulations to Ph.D. student Jolene Ramsey (Mukhopadhyay lab) who was awarded the American Society for Microbiology's three-year Robert D. Watkins Graduate Research Fellowship.

IU's Student Experience blog recently spotlighted Gloria Xue, one of only 10 students accepted for the summer portion of this year’s Integrated Freshman Learning Experience program, and her research in the Calvi lab. Associate Professor Brian Calviand his lab hosted incoming IU freshman Xue, who searched for genes that may cause some cancer cells to resist radiation treatment.
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blog post
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Students received a crash course in science during the inaugural Holland RISE Program, the third installment of Biology's Jim Holland summer research programs for high school students. The Jim Holland Research Initiative in STEM Education (RISE) bridges the gap between early high school STEM initiatives with college and beyond. IU alum Mary Ann Tellas co-directs the Holland programs with Professor Armin Moczek.
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IU Science at Work blog | IU Bloomington Research
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Graduate student Courtney Ellison (Brun lab) has been elected Chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Seminar that will immediately precede the Gordon Research Conference on Bacterial Cell Surfaces, the preeminent meeting in this field.

Graduate student Mandy Gibson (Lively lab) received the 2016 Thomas Henry Huxley Award for designing a hands-on game that requires students to collaborate to generate data and test predictions of the Red Queen Hypothesis. The Huxley award recognizes outreach and education achievement for early- and mid-career scientists. Gibson also received an honorable mention for the W.D. Hamilton Award for best student presentation at the 2016 Evolution Conference.
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Huxley award
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Professor Dan Tracey, Assistant Scientist Stephanie Mauthner, and colleagues have found that a suite of genes in both fruit flies and humans—including one dubbed "smoke alarm"—plays a role in nerve sensitivity. The study could help lead to new drug targets in pain management.
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IU news release | article
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Associate Professor Nick Sokol and collaborators published an eLife article on the relationship between developmental timing and oncogenesis: young neural stem cells are oncogenic but this potential diminishes as animals age and downregulate temporal factors, including the RNA-binding protein LIN-28 and its mRNA targets.
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article
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Studies on dark-eyed juncos have shed new light on mechanics of testosterone-mediated evolution—showing that the testes may play a more important role in evolution than previously thought. The research, led by Assistant Professor Kimberly Rosvall, has produced two recent papers. Co-authors are Christine Bergeon Burns, Sonya Jayaratna, Emma Dossey, and Ellen Ketterson.
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IU news release | paper 1 abstract | paper 2 abstract
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"Integration Host Factor and LuxR synergistically bind DNA to co-activate quorum-sensing genes in Vibrio harveyi" by faculty members Dean Rowe-Magnus and Juliavan Kessel has been published in Molecular Microbiology.
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abstract
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Professor Armin Moczek and his former postdoctoral research associate Teiya Kijimoto have significantly advanced understanding of the genetic pathways controlling the appearance of different physical traits in the same species depending on nutritional conditions experienced during development. Their work is reported in PNAS.
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IU news release | abstract
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A study—led by Professor David Kehoe and conducted by Ph.D. student Joseph Sanfilippo and former Ph.D. student Animesh Shukla (both in Kehoe Lab) in collaboration with researchers in the United States and France—is the first to show how a process that improves light capture in marine cyanobacteria is regulated.
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IU news release | abstract
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Sophomore Hannah Busey (Moczek Lab) has been named a 2016-17 Goldwater Scholar, a designation that recognizes outstanding college sophomores and juniors who have shown great promise in math, science, or engineering.
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IU news release
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Professor Emeritus Paul Mahlberg, a prominent cannabis researcher, weighs in on the virtues of hemp in a NUVO article exploring the possibility of Indiana becoming a leader in sustainability through hemp.
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article
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Grand Challenge finalists to make public presentations at IUPUI (Apr 26) and IU Bloomington (May 2). Distinguished Professor Ellen Ketterson is team leader for one of the five final proposals: "Preparing for Change: Sustaining Nature’s Assets, Public Health, and Human Well-Being."
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IU news release | video | Inside INdiana Business article
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Journal of Neurophysiology editor-in-chief and a guest expert engage graduate student Sarah Keesom and Associate Professor Laura Hurley in a discussion about their recent work on whether serotonergic fluctuations in sensory regions reflect variation within a context like opposite-sex interaction. Keesom and Hurley's article "Socially induced serotonergic fluctuations in the male auditory midbrain correlate with female behavior during courtship" appears in the journal.
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podcast | article
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As the inaugural recipient of the Hermann J. Muller Award for Contributions to Our Understanding of Genes and Society, leading geneticist and neuropsychologist Dr. Nancy Wexler will deliver her lecture “Mendel, Muller, Morgan, Mom, and me: an ever-expanding voyage of discovery" on Apr. 25 during the award ceremony. Wexler, whose research led to the identification of the Huntington’s disease gene, is president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.
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IU news release
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Professor Armin Moczek to co-lead an $8.7 million grant on evolutionary development: Moczek, Distinguished Professor Mike Wade, and IU colleagues will receive $1.25 million to lead three of 22 projects that span nearly 50 scientists at eight institutions in the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden.
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IU news release
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Distinguished Professor Mike Wade explores the role of interaction in evolution in his new book Adaptation in Metapopulations: How Interaction Changes Evolution.
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book jacket
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Distinguished Professor Roger Hangarter will be among those honored for excellence in teaching, research, and service to the university on Apr. 8 at the 2016 Celebration of Distinguished Teaching dinner.
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IU news release
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Associate Professor Rich Phillips is a member of the NASA-led team that has developed a way to detect the presence of underground forest fungi by using satellite images. This information may help researchers predict how climate change will alter forest habitats.
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news release | abstract
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EEB graduate student Brian Steidinger (Bever Lab) won the 2015 JBS Haldane Early Career Researcher Award, which recognizes the best paper in the BES journal Functional Ecology written by an author at the start of his/her career.
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winner announcement
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Assistant Professor Erik Ragsdale has received NSF funding to identify the genetic mechanism that makes up a "switch" allowing some genetically identical species to develop strikingly different physical characteristics based on their environment—a phenomenon known as "polyphenism."
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IU news release
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Professor Armin Moczek and Karen Innes (Associate Executive Director, WonderLab) have been awarded an Ostrom Foundation grant in support of their project, "Institutionalizing K-12 Science Outreach in South-Central Indiana and Beyond: Resource development, teacher training, and mentoring the next generation of principal investigators."

Genetics highlights the classic 1943 paper "Mutations of bacteria from virus sensitivity to virus resistance" by Salvador Edward Luria and Max Delbrück in its February 2016 issue as the journal celebrates its centennial. Luria received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Delbrück and Alfred Hershey) for discoveries made while working at IU (1943-50). His research exemplifies the long and rich history of genetics at IU.
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centennial article | IU science blog
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Professors Leonie Moyle and Matthew Hahn, along with former IU graduate student James Pease and postdoc David Haak, examine the complex genomic changes that accompany rapid speciation among wild tomatoes. Their study was published in PLoS Biology.
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IU news release | article
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Professor Roger Innes; postdocs Sang-Hee Kim, Dong Qi, and Tom Ashfield; and graduate student Matthew Helm have modified a plant gene that normally fights bacterial infection to confer resistance to a virus as well as diseases caused by fungi, oomycetes, and nematode worms. The method is described in their paper in Science.
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IU news release | article
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Professor Patricia Foster is the principal investigator and senior author on a study finding that a "gap in the armor" of DNA may allow an enzyme to trigger cancer-causing mutations. Also contributing to the study from IU Biology is Research Associate Jesse Townes.
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IU news release | article
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The Hu lab has published an article "An ensemble of specifically targeted proteins stabilizes cortical microtubules in the human parasite Toxoplasma gondii" in Molecular Biology of the Cell. The work was led by Assistant Scientist Jun Liu and undergraduate student Phoebe (Yudou) He (co-first authors) and is featured as the cover of the Feb 1 issue of MBoC.
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cover | article
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Graduate student Rachel Samson and Professor Steve Bell have published an article, "Mechanism of archaeal MCM helicase recruitment to DNA replication origins,” in Molecular Cell in which they describe the molecular basis of one of the very first steps in the initiation of DNA replication.
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article
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Distinguished Professor Ellen Ketterson is team leader for the IU Grand Challenges research program proposal, "Preparing for Change: Sustaining Nature's Assets, Public Health, and Human Well-Being," Her team's was one of the five proposals selected for development into full proposals due in April. Announcement of the one or two to be funded is expected in June.
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IU news release
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Professor Jeff Palmer, a world-renowned expert on plant molecular evolution and phylogeny, has been awarded the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of genome structure, function, and evolution.
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IU news release
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Professor Armin Moczek has been named a 2015 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a distinction that recognizes outstanding contributions to the progress of science and research.
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IU news release
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2015

Professor Mike Lynch and postdoctoral researcher Georgi Marinov co-authored 'The bioenergetic costs of a gene,' reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describing for the first time how much total energy is needed to build and maintain a cell and how this scales with cell size.
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IU news release | abstract
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Graduate student Nikki Rendon (Demas Lab)—as lead author of an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B—discusses a hormonal mechanism in hamsters that connects short winter days with increased aggression in females. It differs from the mechanism that controls the same response in males.
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IU news release | article | Discover magazine blog
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Research Associates Anna Macagno and Oliver Beckers and Professor Armin Moczek on the cover of the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: 'Differentiation of early ovarian development and the evolution of fecundity in rapidly diverging exotic beetle populations.'
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article | cover
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Professors Rudy and Elizabeth Raff were presented the Distinguished Career Award while attending the 2015 Geological Society of America meeting in Baltimore Nov. 1-4. The award from the Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division of the organization was given for the Raffs' outstanding contributions to geobiosciences.
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announcement | IU science blog
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Doctoral student Jessica Hite (Hall lab) is "fusing public art and science to not only provide an essential breeding habitat for Chimney Swifts but also engage multiple groups in environmental outreach and education, and to contribute to long-term local and national monitoring programs of these birds." Support for Hite's "Swifts in the City" project comes from an Elinor Ostrom Program Grant for which Hite applied and was awarded.
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IU news release | Herald-Times article
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Members of the Department of Biology extend their condolences to the family of George Hudock, associate professor emeritus of biology, who passed away on January 24, 2015.

A team of IU microbiologists (Yves Brun, Daniel Kearns, Sidney Shaw, and Malcolm Winkler) and chemists (Stephen Jacobson and Michael Van Nieuwenhze) have been awarded a major $3.4 million collaborative grant by the National Institutes of Health to develop new reagents and methods to study the bacterial cell wall, the main target for the design of new antibiotics.
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IU news release
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The David Starr Jordan Prize for innovative contributions to the study of evolution, ecology, population, and organismal biology will be awarded to Daniel I. Bolnick, professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, during a ceremony at IU in Jordan Hall A100 on March 2 at 4:00 p.m. Bolnick will present a lecture.
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IU news release
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Indiana University has promoted Craig Pikaard to distinguished professor, the highest academic rank the university can bestow upon its faculty.
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IU news release
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World-renowned virologist Susana López, a professor of genetics and molecular biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Biotechnology, will present the 34th Joan Wood Lecture on March 11 at 4pm in Myers Hall 130.
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IU news release
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Biology undergraduate Radhika Agarwal (Brun lab) has been chosen to receive the Provost’s Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity. The award recognizes undergraduates who collaborate on or spearhead excellent or original academic work.
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IU news release
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Biology students Radhika Agarwal, Leslie Lundewall, and Emma Winkler were among the outstanding IU Bloomington undergraduates recognized for exceptional achievement during the annual Founders Day Honors Convocation. Winkler was the student speaker at the event.
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IU news release
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Graduate student Erkin Kuru, Professor Yves Brun, and collaborators have published an article in Nature Communications on the discovery of a peptidoglycan cell wall in Planctomycetes. The discovery ends a long-standing debate and has important implications for research on the evolution of prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
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article
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Faculty members Spencer Hall, Justin Kumar, and Jake McKinlay have each received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award. The award is presented to recognize and enhance excellent teaching at the university.

'Bub3 promotes Cdc20-dependent activation of the APC/C in S. cerevisiae' by graduate student Yang Yang, postdoc Dai Tsuchiya, and Assistant Professor Soni Lacefield has been published in the Journal of Cell Biology. In the paper, they demonstrate that Bub3 has an unexpected role promoting metaphase progression in budding yeast. Their work was highlighted in the biobytes podcast for the journal. Listen to the interview of Lacefield on the podcast (starts at 11:07).
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article
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U.S. News and World Report features undergraduate Sarah Cummins' research in "Many skin bacteria are dead or inactive, study finds." Cummins is a member of the Lennon Lab.
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article | ASM release
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Findings made by Irene Newton’s lab about Wolbachia genomes and the intracellular bacterium's adaptability to its host are featured in the July 2015 issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology.
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article
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Professor Jeff Palmer led the study that discovered the first known instance of a plant or animal lacking several key genes involved in energy production in cells. Palmer, postdoc Elizabeth Skippington, research associate Danny Rice, and colleague Todd Barkman (W. Mich. Univ. at Kalamazoo) reported in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the parasitic plant Viscum scurruloideum, a species of mistletoe, has the apparent ability to survive and thrive without several genes involved in the primary energy-producing pathway of oxygen-respiring organisms.
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IU news release | abstract
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Chao Jiang's (Brun lab) dissertation, “Evolution of Bacterial Morphology and Beyond,” has been selected as a winner of the Esther L. Kinsley Ph.D. Dissertation Award for 2015, the highest honor for research that IU bestows upon its graduate students.

A gift of over $4.6 million to the College of Arts & Sciences from alumnus Larry Blatt (a pioneering virologist and founder of Alios BioPharma Inc.) will fund an array of new and ongoing endowments, including $2 million to endow a virology chair in the Department of Biology and $500,000 for the Milton Taylor Fellowship, initially created by Blatt in 2000 in honor of his mentor, Professor Emeritus Milton Taylor.
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IU news release
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An evolutionary war between microorganisms affects human health according to Assistant Scientist Farrah Bashey-Visser in her recent article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
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IU news release | article
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Professor Armin Moczek and co-authors in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, "The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions, and predictions." This publication has been selected by the editors of the Proceedings as a "Darwin Review," a once-a-year publication judged to be of "...very high interest to the whole diverse readership of Proceedings B, often being of particular relevance to strategic growth areas, importance to policy makers, and having a bearing on the public that fund our science."
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IU news release | article | Royal Society press release
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From labs to fields, IU students and faculty are working to save honey bees. IU's "Keepers of the Bees" story includes honey bee studies by Assistant Professor Irene Newton and her graduate students Freddy Lee and Kayla Miller and features long-time beekeeper Professor Emeritus George Hegeman. Also featured is the IU Beekeeping Club, for which Newton serves as the faculty advisor.
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IU story | Newton video | Hegeman video
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Amilcar Perez (Winkler Lab) won a best poster award for graduate students for his work on functional and genetic relationships of essential cell division proteins in Stretptococcus pneumoniae at the annual Midwest Microbial Pathogenesis Conference (MMPC) held in Indianapolis from August 28-30, 2015, and attended by over 260 scientists.

Professor Craig Pikaard has been awarded the 2015 Martin Gibbs Medal from the American Society of Plant Biologists, one of the highest honors in plant biology. The medal is presented biennially to an individual who has pioneered advances that have served to establish new directions of investigation in the plant sciences.
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announcement
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Professor Greg Demasis co-author on a study that found that sexual activity (even outside the window of ovulation) causes immune system changes which increase chances of conception. The results could eventually influence recommendations for couples trying to get pregnant and could also potentially impact treatment for people with autoimmune disorders.
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IU news release
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ProfessorPatricia Foster, Professor Haixu Tang, and colleagues have found that forces in the external environment and oxidation are the greatest threats to an organism’s ability to repair damage to its own DNA. The results are reported in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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IU news release | article
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On Oct. 16, more than 150 local high school students served as citizen scientists to monitor stream health as part of the Hoosier Riverwatch program. Lecturer Tara Darcy-Hall was one of several adult volunteers aiding the students with the project.
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article
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2014

Former undergraduate researcher, Gina Gordon, is first author on a new paper from the McKinlay lab that addresses why CO2 fixation is needed during photosynthetic growth of bacteria on organic compounds.
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article abstract
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C. David Allis, a pioneer in the field of epigenetics and the relationship between genes and disease who received his master's degree and Ph.D. in biology from IU Bloomington, has received the Japan Prize, one of the most prestigious international prizes in science.
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IU news release
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Clay Fuqua has been elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific arm of the American Society for Microbiology.

Elise Morton (recent postdoc), Thomas Platt, Clay Fuqua, and Jim Bever are co-authors on a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about their study providing experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for interactions between independently replicating, genetic elements called plasmids that are co-existing within a single bacterium.
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article
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Yves Brun and his wife Julie Auger (French Linguistics) have both been awarded a 2014-2015 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant.

Gene silencing instructions acquired through 'molecular memory' tags on chromatin: A team of 12 IU scientists led by Craig Pikaard identified the machinery of epigenetic inheritance, relevant to development and cancer.
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IU news release
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Biology congratulates more 2014 student award recipients: Three Department of Biology seniors were among the students recognized at the 2014 Founders Day Honors Convocation held on April 6.
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news article
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IU has been rated as the top biology graduate program in the country by GraduatePrograms.com. The extensive list of programs was compiled using information submitted by current and recent graduate students between Sept. 1, 2012, and Apr. 15, 2014. The rankings encompass reviews posted by more than 60,000 students participating in over 1,500 graduate programs.
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GraduatePrograms.com 'Best Biology Colleges'
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MC-IRIS (Monroe County Chapter of Identify and Reduce Invasive Species) presented the 2014 Fightin' IRIS Action Award on June 7 to IU Herbarium Director Eric Knox in recognition of his efforts to eradicate invasive plant species in the Griffy Lake Nature Preserve. In completing the service learning environmental management component of their courses, Knox's students removed invasive garlic mustard and bush honeysuckle. "This award is really a tribute to the trained eyes and hard work of the students," said Knox.

Congratulations to Nikki Rendon (Demas lab) who was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Rendon brings the total NSF DDIGs awarded to Biology students this year to seven.

Graduate student Erkin Kuru (Brun and VanNieuwenhze labs) won the best poster prize at the Metabolic Engineering X conference held in Vancouver June 15-19.

Eric Knox sequenced 52 plastid genomes in order to reconstruct the extensive rearrangementsin the plant families Campanulaceae, Cyphiaceae, and Lobeliaceae. His work and discoveries are documented in the PNAS article "The dynamic history of plastid genomes in the Campanulaceae sensu lato is unique among angiosperms."
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abstract
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Work from Irene Garcia Newton's lab to create the first metatranscriptome of the honey bee gut has shed new light on how organisms work together and apart from one another to carry out the dominant function of the gut microbiome: carbohydrate metabolism.
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IU news release | IU Science at Work article
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Two biology faculty members and their collaborators have been selected to receive IU's inaugural Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award: Professors Yves Brun and Michael VanNieuwenhze (Chemistry) and the group of professors Roger Hangarter, Margaret Dolinsky (Fine Arts), and John Gibson (Jacobs School of Music).

Members of the Department of Biology extend their condolences to the families of James Goodson, professor of biology, who passed away on Aug. 14, 2014, and Albert Ruesink, emeritus professor of biology, who passed away on Aug. 17, 2014.
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Goodson obituary | Ruesink obituary
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Published in PLOS Genetics is the article 'The actomyosin machinery is required for Drosophila retinal lumen formation' by graduate student Jing Nie, research scientist Simpla Mahato, and Assistant Professor Andrew C. Zelhof. An image from the article was featured on the journal index page of the 09/18/2014 issue.
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article
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On Dec. 12 Biology professors Roger Hangarter and Yves Brun and colleagues will give public presentations about their projects that earned each of their teams IU's Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award.
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IU news release
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An IU-led team of biologists has earned one of 12 biodiversity grants awarded by NSF: Associate Professor Jay T. Lennon and postdoc Ken Locey (in collaboration with Notre Dame assistant professor Stuart Jones) have been awarded over $1.9 million to fund research over the next five years aimed at better understanding the role of dormancy in maintaining microbial diversity.
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IU news release
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Associate Professor Heather Reynolds, former graduate student Alex Smith, and colleague James Farmer's paper 'Think globally, research locally: Paradigms and place in agroecological research' has been published in a special edition of The American Journal of Botany. [Side note: An organizing editor for the special issue is Briana Gross, who earned her PhD with Loren Reiseberg at IU and is now Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth.]
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article
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Professor Xuemei Chen (Dept. of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside) will present the Carlos O. Miller Lecture on Oct. 30 at 4 p.m. in Myers 130. The title of her talk is "Mechanisms of microRNA turnover in Arabidopsis."
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Miller Lecture web page
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Professor Ellen Ketterson received the Cooper Ornithological Society's Loye and Alden Miller Award for Lifetime Achievement at the society's annual meeting in September. The award has special significance since Alden Miller was an important figure in early junco science, as revealed in Chapter 3 of Ordinary Extraordinary Junco, which also documents the Ketterson lab's junco research.

"A social–ecological framework for 'micromanaging' microbial services" by Ariane Peralta, Associate Professor Jay Lennon, and colleagues is the cover article for the November issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
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cover | article
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Members of the Moczek Lab (Teiya Kijimoto, Emilie Snell-Rood, Melissa Pespeni, Armin Moczek) in collaboration with IU statisticians Karen Kafadar and Guilherme Rocha in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London examine "The nutritionally responsive transcriptome of the polyphenic beetle Onthophagus taurus and the importance of sexual dimorphism and body region."
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abstract/article
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A new climate change modeling tool developed by postdoc Ben Sulman, Associate Professor Rich Phillips, and colleagues finds that carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere owing to greater plant growth from rising CO2 levels will be partially offset by changes in the activity of soil microbes that derive their energy from plant root growth.
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IU news release | article
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Professor Matthew Hahn and colleagues have published two articles in Science on speciation and evolution in mosquitoes. Graduate student James Pease is co-first-author on one of them and graduate student Gregg Thomas contributed to the other.
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news coverage | cover
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Graduate student Erkin Kuru, Professor Yves Brun, and collaborators have an article in Nature on a new mechanism for bacterial cell division that is regulated by phosphorylation.
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article
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This Fri., Dec. 12, Biology professors Roger Hangarter and Yves Brun and colleagues will discuss their projects that earned each of their teams IU's Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award. Presentations will be at 3:30pm in Woodburn 101; reception in Woodburn 200 after presentations.
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Research IUB news | invitation | IU news release
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Beetle Mania: Indiana University Alumni Magazine covers Professor Armin Moczek, his research with beetles, and why beetles are a model system to
learn more about various aspects of evolutionary developmental biology.
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IUAM cover | IUAM article
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2013

Microbiology undergraduate Leah Palmer has been featured in the Office of Scholarships' January Scholar Spotlight.
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spotlight
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Ph. D cadidate Chris Muir of the Moyle Lab on how the Monstera (or Swiss Cheese) plant got its holes featured in the American Society of Naturalists.
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feature | article
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Assistant ProfessorKristi Montooth, Assistant Scientist Colin Meiklejohn, and former undergraduate researcher Mo Siddiq have mapped the interaction of an incompatible genotype that could be a better predictor of genetically complex human diseases.
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press release
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Mary Ann Tellas, Jennifer Tarter, and Armin Moczekhave received a grant from the National Science Foundation in support of the Jim Holland Summer Science Research Program.

Karen Innes and Armin Moczek have received a grant from the 2013 Ostrom Grants Program in support of a project titled Development, application and dissemination of teaching resources to K12 educators in South-Central Indiana.

Stephen Bell and collegues from Montana State University have discovered a striking connection between viruses such as HIV and Ebola and viruses that infect organisms called archaea that grow in volcanic hot springs.
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press release
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David Kehoe and his team have uncovered how a control system produces the important light-harvesting antennae that power photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, an outcome of NSF-funded research.
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NSF highlight
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David Kehoe and graduate student Adam Bussell uncovered a give-and-take communication system between and within photoreceptors in freshwater-dwelling cyanobacteria, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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IU press release | abstract
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Soni Lacefield with postdoc Dai Tsuchiya in Current Biology for their work entitled "Cdk1 modulation ensures the coordination of cell-cycle events during the switch from meiotic prophase to mitosis".
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abstract
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Research from a team led by Michael Lynchshows for the first time how asexual lineages of a species are doomed from fast-paced gene conversion processes that simply unmask pre-existing deleterious recessive mutations.
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IU press release
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Armin Moczek and colleagues at IU's School of Education have received a 3-year award from the National Science Foundation to explore the learning and teaching of complex systems in young children.
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press release
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Armin Moczek, Guilherme Rocha (IU Statistics) and Cathy Olmer (WonderLab) have received a 4-year award from the National Science Foundation in support of their project titled Origin, diversification, and integration of sex- and nutrition-dependent development in horned beetles.

Recent research from a team of IU biologists led by David Kehoe, in collaboration with Jeff Palmer, revealed that a ubiquitous translation initiation factor called IF3 also plays a role in the regulation of gene expression in many bacteria and possibly plants.
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IU press release
]

IU Bloomington ranks 11th in the nation and second in the Big 10 in The College Database’s 50 Colleges Advancing Women in STEM programs.
[
IU press release
]

IU Department of Biology ranks #2 among the Fall 2013 Top Graduate Biology Programs according to students.
[
program rankings
]

Heather Reynolds, Roger Hangarter, Jonathan Bauer, and Natalie Christian, with other colleagues from Indiana University, Monroe County Identify and Reduce Invasive Species, City of Bloomington Parks and Recreation, and Sassafras Audubon Society, are recipients of a grant from Audubon's Toyota TogetherGreen program to conduct research, restoration, and outreach in Bloomington's urban woodlands.
[
IU news release
]

IU-designed probe opens new path for drug development against leading STD: The new research, "A new metabolic cell wall labeling method reveals peptidoglycan in Chlamydia trachomatis," by Erkin Kuru, Yves Brun, and colleagues was published in Nature on Dec. 11, 2013. Their Nature paper is featured on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) web page, and Kuru's Chlamydiae cell wallphoto was featured in NIH NIGMS "Holiday Season Cells."
[
IU news release | article | NIAID feature | photo feature
]

Gene transfer gone wild reveals driving force behind mitochondrial 'sex': Research led by Jeffrey Palmer and Danny Rice uncovers largest acquisition of foreign genes from other species in any organism. A paper by Palmer and Rice; former Palmer-lab members Andy Alverson, Aaron Richardson, Greg Young, and Virginia Sanchez-Puerta; Eric Knox; and their co-authors titled "Horizontal transfer of entire genomes via mitochondrial fusion in the angiosperm Amborella" was released by Science Dec. 19.
[
IU news release | article
]

Richard Phillips has received a research grant from the National Science Foundation to fund "A belowground framework for predicting how plant-microbe interactions couple carbon and nutrient economies of forests".

Armin Moczek has been awarded a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation entitled "Integrating evolution and development of novelty and diversity through the study of horned beetles".

Brent Lockwood has received a 3-year NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship to work with Kristi Montooth and Thom Kaufman on a project entitled "Coping with stress: the cellular maintenance of embryonic development".

Melissa Pespeni has received a 3-year NSF postdoctoral fellowship to work with Armin Moczek on a project entitled "Mechanisms of diversification: integrating comparative genomics, transcriptomics, and functional developmental approaches in horned beetles".

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Bill Niswander—carpenter and general craftsman for the department for close to 30 years—who passed away Wednesday, February 8, 2012.

Sid Shaw and Jessica Lucas (Shaw postdoc) are featured in a front page story in Bloomington's Herald-Times newspaper, for their work with an AP Biology class at Bloomington High School South.
[
article pdf
]

David Nelson has been awarded funding from the National Institutes of Health to genetically modify variants of the human pathogen chlamydia in hopes of finding a vaccine for the most commonly reported bacterial infectious disease in the United States.
[
press release
]

Kevin Cook and group have been published to Genome Biology, describing the culmination of work in Bloomington "to bring together a second generation deficiency kit with increased genome coverage, improved resolution and precise breakpoint mapping" of the Drosophila genome.
[
article | commentary
]

The members of the Department of Biology extend their condolences to the family of Howard Gest, distinguished professor emeritus of microbiology, who passed away on April 24, 2012.

Deidra Jacobsen-Castillo (Delph Lab), Nikki Rendon (Demas Lab) and others selected by the National Science Foundation to receive prestigious awards through its Graduate Research Fellowship Program including funding for the next 3 years.
[
article
]

Graduate students Dan Johnson and Wes Beaulieu with faculty members Jim Bever and Keith Clay have been published in Science, showing for the first time that specices diversity is influenced by how well tree seedlings survive under their own parents.
[
abstract | press release
]

Kristi Montooth has been awarded a 5-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award entitled "The physiology and genetics of adaptation to a complex environment" that will support research in her lab and in the classroom.
[
press release
]

Rudolf Raff has published the book Once We All Had Gills, exploring evolution and his experience becoming an evolutionary biologist.
[
IU press
]

Jake McKinlay has been awarded a 5-year early career award from the US Department of Energy to study the metabolism and evolution of a biofuel-producing microbial co-culture.
[
press release
]

Yves Brun and collaborator Bogdan Dragnea have received a 4-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the regulation and biophysical properties of the holdfast, a bacterial adhesin with impressive adhesive force.

The members of the Department of Biology extend their condolences to the family of Carlos Miller, distinguished professor emeritus of biology, who passed away on August 18, 2012.
[
obituary
]

Undergraduates are encouraged to attend the first IU Biomed Virtual Grad School Fair on September 12th, where students will be able to live chat with recruiters. This event is free for students who register to attend. Please send any questions to the Graduate Office.
[
details
]

Patricia Foster and colleagues have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for producing one of the most extensive pictures ever of mutation processes in the DNA sequence of an organism.
[
press release
]

Kimberly Rosvall and Ellen Ketterson of Biology with Haixu Tang of Informatics have been awarded a 2-year exploratory grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how social challenges prime the brain and body for social instability.

Jing Nie, Andrew Zelhof, and collegues on the cover of Developmental Biology for their work entitled "Cross species analysis of Prominin reveals a conserved cellular role in invertebrate and vertebrate photoreceptor cells."
[
article
]

Erkin Kuru, graduate student with Yves Brun and Michael VanNieuwenhze, is the Graduate and Professional Student Organization student of the month for November.
[
feature
]

Postdoctoral Researcher Teiya Kijimoto, Armin Moczek, and Justen Andrews in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA investigate the role of the gene doublesex in the regulation and evolution of sexual dimorphisms and male polyphenisms in horned beetles.
[
abstract | press release
]

Undergraduate Biology and French double-major Kimberly Long has been named a 2011 Goldwater Scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
[
Goldwater Scholarship
]

Four of our longest-serving staff members retire at the end June: Joel McCoy (41 years working in Biology), Chris Willen (37 years working in Biology), Ken Sauerheber (34 years in Biology), and Betty McGlocklin (31 years at IU, 22 in Biology). Combined this represents 143 years of experience! They have each made a lasting impact on the Biology Department and we have all greatly benefited from their dedication and service.

The collected field notes of Emeritus Professor of Law and Biology Val Nolan (1920-2008) have been published in digital format through the IU Scholar Works repository.
[
field notes | Smithsonian news article
]

Susanne Kraemer (Velicer grad student) and Gregory Velicer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: Endemic social diversity within natural kin groups of a cooperative bacterium.
[
article
]

Joel McGlothlin (Ph.D. '07), a member of Ellen Ketterson's lab during his time at IU, and now a postdoc with Butch Brodie, was awarded the 2011 Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize by the Society for the Study of Evolution, a prize given to recognize the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologist.
[
awardee biography
]

Behavior 2011, the first-ever joint meeting of the International Ethological Conference (IEC) and the Animal Behavior Society (ABS), is expected to draw more than 1,100 researchers from around the world for the July 25-30 conference on campus.
[
press release
]

Ellen Ketterson received the 2011 Distinguished Faculty award from the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association and was recognized at the College’s Annual Recognition Banquet in October.
[
press release
]

Robert Niescier (graduate student), Tai Min, and colleague in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Mitochondrial matrix Ca2+ as an intrinsic signal regulating mitochondrial mobility in axons.
[
abstract
]

Kayla King (Ph.D. '11) has been awarded a Newton International Fellowship by the Royal Society and British Academy, which provides two years of postdoctoral funding and up to 10 additional years of research funding.

Emilia Martins has been elected a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, in recognition of her pioneering work on combining phylogenetic analyses with meticulous comparative analyses of behavior across lizard taxa to gain insight into the evolution of behavior.
[
newsletter pdf (p.8)
]

Distinguished Professor Emeritus John Preer has been awarded the President's Medal by IU President Michael McRobbie. The President's Medal, first presented in 1985, recognizes individuals for distinction in public service, service to IU, achievement in a profession and/or extraordinary merit and achievement in the arts, humanities, science, education and industry.
[
press release
]

Joe Pomerening is featured in the faculty spotlight of the October newsletter from IU's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning: Making Connections in a Large Lecture Class.
[
article
]

Michael Lynch and Matthew Hahn will serve as co-PIs of the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS), being established at IUB with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
[
press release
]

Armin Moczek and a collaborator have received a conference grant from NSF to fund "The SICB 2012 Society-Wide Symposium: The Impacts of Developmental Plasticity on Evolutionary Innovation and Diversification" at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of William Zimmerman—local artist whose 'Birds of Indiana' paintings line the central hallway of Jordan Hall—who passed away Saturday, November 19, 2011.

Pat Foster, Carl Bauer and David Dilcher have all been selected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This is a terrific honor for Pat, Carl, and David, and brings increased recognition to the Department of Biology (Pat and David) and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry (Carl) for the outstanding quality of the research programs of our faculty. The addition of Pat to our list of currently active faculty members named as AAAS fellows brings Biology's count to 15, or nearly 25% of our faculty.
[
press release
]

Michael Wade has been named the 2011-2012 Distinguished Faculty Research Lecturer by Indiana University. Previous recipients include Ellen Ketterson, John Preer, Howard Gest, and Tony Mahowald.

IU microbiologist Dan Kearns has been awarded an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award by Indiana University. The award, presented annually by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, enables faculty to enhance their research and recognizes junior faculty members who have devoted considerable time to IU's teaching, research and service missions.

Three new teaching laboratories are now open in Jordan Hall, seating up to 100 students simultaneously at benches supplied with state-of-the-art equipment.
[
IU press release
]

Matthew Hahn has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in recognition for his work in the field of Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. The prestigious fellowship is intended to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.
[
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
]

Don Gilbert is among 200+ coauthors on a new paper published by the Pea Aphid Genomics Consortium in PLOS Biology: Genome Sequence of the Pea Aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum.
[
article
]

Jonathan Atwell (graduate student in Ellen Ketterson's lab), has been awarded the Wells Graduate Fellowship for the 2010-2011 academic year. Established by the late Herman B Wells, the fellowship is awarded annually to an IU graduate student who demonstrates the qualities for which Chancellor Wells was renowned: leadership abilities, academic excellence, character, social consciousness, and generosity of spirit.
[
University awards for graduate students
]

Armin Moczek has received a Long-Term Sabbatical Fellowship from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center for the 2010-2011 academic year, in support of a project entitled "The nature of nurture: How environmental and genetic information interact to shape development and evolution."
[
NESCent
]

Heather Reynolds' course, "The City as Ecosystem", is featured in an article about service-learning in the February 2010 issue of IU Home Pages.
[
article
]

An article by Keith Clay and former postdoc Jen Rudgers in the Journal of Applied Ecology, "Managing plant symbiosis: fungal endophyte genotype alters plant community composition", is featured in a News & Views article in the March 11 issue of Nature.
[
JAE article | Nature article
]

Keith Clay has accepted IU's first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certification by the U.S. Green Building Council, awarded in recognition of the energy saving construction and design of the IU Research and Teaching Preserve field lab building.
[
IURTP field lab | Hoosier Times article | USGBC LEED info
]

Graduate student Velocity Hughes from Yves Brun's lab has been awarded the McCormick Science Grant by the IU College of Arts & Sciences. This grant is awarded to the graduate student member of a faculty/graduate student team whose research is judged most creative, visionary, and innovative. Some of her research is described in her recent paper in PNAS, "Protein localization and dynamics within a bacterial organelle."
[
PNAS abstract | McCormick Science Grant
]

Undergraduates Erika Cannon Anderson (Biology major), and Jennifer Kulow (Biology and Astrophysics double-major) have been awarded Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, along with two other IU undergraduates. Awarded to only 300 undergraduates nationwide each year, the scholarship is widely considered to be the most prestigious award for undergraduates studying science in the U.S.
[
Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship
]

And the winner is...Biology graduate student Sarah Shannon-Firestone, whose winning design for the Biology Green Team logo will grace our initiatives for years to come.
[
see the logo on the Green Team page
]

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Jerry Warthan—Building Supervisor for Jordan and Myers Halls and an IU employee for over 24 years—who passed away Monday, April 19, 2010.

Congratulations to former Biology Department faculty Tom Blumenthal and Susan Strome, who were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this week. Tom spent the majority of his career at IUB, from 1973 to 1996, including 7 years as Chair of the department, and is now Chair at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Susan was at IUB from 1983 through 2007, was named a Chancellor's Professor in 2005, and served as head of the GCDB section for many years. She now is on the faculty at U.C. Santa Cruz.
[
GSA press release | full list of new AAAS fellows (pdf)
]

The National Institutes of General Medical Sciences at the NIH has awarded the IU Department of Biology 5 years of funding at over 4 million dollars to continue the Genetics, Cellular and Molecular Sciences T32 Training Grant. This award will continue the program through its 36th year. The GCMS training grant supports 16 graduate students per year, working with nearly 50 different training faculty associated with Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry and Medical Science graduate programs.
[
GCSM site
]

Wenli Li, a graduate student of Mike Lynch, has been awarded a dissertation year fellowship by the IU College of Arts and Sciences, as well as an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Distinguished ProfessorLoren Rieseberg has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society, joining the ranks of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth's leading scientists as the Society celebrates its 350th anniversary.
[
press release
]

The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center has received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that will fund facility renovations necessary to double the number of strains maintained by the facility.
[
BDSC | HHMI
]

Heather Reynolds, Jonathan Bauer, and campus and community colleagues have been awarded a Sustainability Research Development Grant by the University to remediate exotic invasive species in Dunn's Woods.
[
press release
]

Richard Hardy, Justin Kumar, and Tuli Mukhopadhyay have been awarded a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the response to alphavirus replication in an arthropod host.

Loralyn Cozy (graduate student) and Dan Kearns on the cover of Molecular Microbiology: Gene position in a long operon governs motility development in Bacillus subtilis.
[
article
]

Biology major Ellen Weinzapfel and Biology minor (Anthropology major) Rebeca Hernandez, along with three other graduating IU seniors, were awarded the Provost's Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity this spring.
[
press release
]

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles Heiser, who passed away Friday, June 11, 2010.
[
obituary
]

Spencer Hall and coauthor Megan Duffy have been awarded the Mercer Award by the Ecological Society of America, for their paper "Selective predation and rapid evolution can jointly dampen effects of parasites on Daphnia populations," published in American Naturalist in 2008.

The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center has been awarded a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to more than double the capacity of its facility. When complete, the renovated facility with be able to curate 60,000-70,000 different genetic fruit fly variants of importance to research.
[
press release
]

Roger Hangarter's time-lapse photography documenting algae cohabiting with salamander embryos in their eggs is mentioned in a Nature news article about collaborator Ryan Kerney's research on the first example of a photosynthetic organism living inside a vertebrate's cells.
[
article
]

Mike Lynch in the PNAS: Scaling expectations for the time to establishment of complex adaptations.
[
abstract
]

A video documenting Peggy Schultz's outreach project with a local third grade class has been awarded 1st place in the Inside our Schools competition of the International Student Media Festival.
[
video
]

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Rosemarie (Rosie) Barkus (Ph.D. '07), who passed away Sunday, November 28, 2010.
[
obituary
]

Idelle Cooper's (Ph.D. '08) doctoral research on sexual dimorphism in the damselfly is featured prominently in a Current Biology dispatch: Sexual Dimorphism: Why the Sexes Are (and Are Not) Different.
[
CB dispatch | Cooper's article
]

The Fall issue of IU's College Magazine, features Biology faculty Yves Brun, Ellen Ketterson, and Joe Pomerening, along with several of our star undergraduate researchers. Joe is featured for his outstanding teaching, while Ellen and Yves are featured for their mentoring as part of the IU STARS program.
[
online article | magazine pdf
]

Bill Niswander, carpenter for Biology for the past 30 years, has been awarded the 2010 IUB campus-wide Service Staff Merit Award.

John Colbourne and Mike Lynch are featured in news articles in the 5 June 2009 issue of Science, reporting on their presentations at the Cold Spring Harbor meeting on "The Biology of the Genome"
[
article
]

David Kysela (Brun postdoc) has been awarded a NIH NSRA postdoctoral fellowship for his research on aging in bacteria.

Clay Fuqua has been awarded the 2009 American Society for Microbiology Indiana Branch Research Award.

Two of our undergraduate Biology majors, Ellen Weinzapfel and Kaleb Naegeli, both juniors, have been selected as 2009 Goldwater Scholarship recipients. Only 287 scholarships were awarded nation-wide this year
[
article
]

Matthew Hahn and Melanie Marketon are featured in the "Sciences at IU" special focus topic of the February 2009 issue of IU Home Pages, as is the move of Carl Bauer's lab from Myers to Simon Hall
[
Hahn article | Marketon article | Bauer article
]

Joel Ybe and adjunct David Giedroc (Chemistry) have been granted $1.2 million from NIH for Huntington's disease research.
[
press release
]

Curt Lively is featured in the same issue of Science, in the News Focus, addressing the origin of sexual reproduction.
[
article
]

Distinguished Professor of Biology Mike Lynch has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He is the 5th current member of our department elected to membership in the National Academy, joining Charley Heiser, Thom Kaufman, Jeff Palmer, and John Preer. This is in addition to 12 past members of our department, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Herman Muller, Tracey Sonneborn, Marcus Rhoades, and Carl Eigenmann.
[
article
]

Scott Michaels' 1999 article in Plant Cell with colleague R. Amasino, entitled "FLOWERING LOCUS C encodes a novel MADS domain protein that acts as a repressor of flowering", has been selected out of more than 4200 articles as one of the journal's top 5 most influential articles in the past 20 years.
[
1999 abstract | press release pdf
]

Armin Moczek and Debra Rose on the cover of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Differential recruitment of limb patterning genes during development and diversification of beetle horns
[
press release
]

Armin Moczek and colleagues have been awarded a grant by the US-Israel Binational Science Fountation entitled "Proteome Profiling of the Horned Beetle Onthophagus taurus".

David Nelson, Qunfeng Dong, and collaborators at the IU School of Medicine have received funds from NIH to conduct the first health study of teenage boys using cellular telephones.
[
press release
]

Carolina Peñalva-Arana (Lynch postdoc) has been awarded an NIH NRSA Fellowship to do work on the evolution and expression of chemoreceptor genes in Daphnia.

Rich Phillips has been awarded a grant from the USDA to study the effects of rhizosphere priming on soil nitrogen availability.

Kim Storvik and Rose Byrne won "best poster" in the graduate and undergraduate categories, respectively, at the April 2009 meeting of the Indiana Branch of the American Society for Microbiology. Kim was also chosen to give an oral presentation, along with Kyle Hetrick. All three students are associated with the Foster lab.

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of our former colleague, Karen Muskavitch, who passed away Monday, January 12, 2009

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of our former staff member, Jerry Wilson, who passed away Friday, January 16, 2009

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Johanna Kolodziejski (Ph.D. '07), who passed away Tuesday, February 3, 2009.

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of our colleague Mee-Rye Cha, who passed away Thursday, February 27, 2009.

Mike Lynch and colleagues in the first issue of Genome Biology and Evolution: After dinosaurs, mammals rise but their genomes get smaller.
[
IU Press Release | Abstract
]

Jim Goodson, postdoc David Kabelik, and students Aubrey Kelly and James Klatt in PNAS: Midbrain dopamine neurons reflect affiliation phenotypes in finches and are tightly coupled to courtship.
[
article
]

Heather Rupp (former Ketterson postdoc), Ellen Ketterson, and colleagues from the Kinsey Institute and Psychological and Brain Sciences have received a $423,500 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study the mechanisms behind postpartum depression.
[
press release
]

Pranav Danthi has been awarded a 2009 American Heart Association Midwest Affiliate Scientist Development Grant.

David Rollo is participating in the Clean Energy Ecology Forum held by the US Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
[
press release
]

2008

Justen Andrews and Armin Moczek have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and apply genomic resources to study the development and evolution of horned beetles.

EEB graduate student Thomas Platt (co-advised by Jim Bever and Clay Fuqua) has been awarded the McCormick Science Grant for 2008. Two grants are awarded each year among all the science disciplines at IUB.
[
details
]

Mike Wade has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Thom Kaufman has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[
press release
]

A symposium honoring Gerald Gastony (emeritus) was held during the Botany 2008 meetings in Vancouver, entitled "From Gels to Genomics: The Evolving Landscape of Pteridology. A Celebration of Gerald Gastony's Contributions to Fern Evolutionary Biology."

The Department of Biology extends its deepest sympathies to the family of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Anthony (Tony) San Pietro, who passed away Saturday, September 13, 2008.

J. Ade, B. DeYoung, C. Golstein (all postdocs in the Innes lab) and Roger Innes in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Indirect activation of a plant NBS-LRR protein by a bacterial protease. Insights from this work may enable scientists to transfer disease resistance traits from one plant species to another, even when these plant species are very distantly related.
[
abstract
]

The acquisition by Tuli Mukhopadhyay and Bogdan Dragnea of a new 300 kV field emission Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) from JEOL distinguishes Indiana University as a major U.S. research facility where scientists can examine both biological and materials science structures at nanoscale resolution.
[
press release
]

Pat Foster has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Election to the Academy recognizes excellence, originality, and creativity in the microbiological sciences.

The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index survey ranks the IU Biology program in Plant Biology second in the country, and the IU Biology program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as third in the country. As a whole, IU ranked 10th among public universities.
[
press release
]

IU Biologists Thom Kaufman and Matthew Hahn are among the many coauthors in Nature's special issue on Drosophila biology, genomics and evolution.
[
press release
]

The U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has accepted a proposal by Yves Brun to sequence the genome of six bacterial to study their potential for bioremediation of toxic compounds in water sources.
[
press release
]

Roger Hangarter and documentarian Samuel Orr have been awarded first prize by Science Magazine and the NSF for their short video about Brood X cidadas.
[
press release | movie
]

Mike Lynch discussed in the New York Times: From Bacteria to Us: What Went Right When Humans Started to Evolve?
[
article
]

Tim Greives, a graduate student in the Demas lab, was awarded an Indiana Academy of Science research grant.

Saul Nava, a graduate student working with Emilia Martins, was awarded a National Institute of Health (NIH) Predoctoral Fellowship.

Lina Li, a graduate student working with David Kehoe, was one of 20 life sciences graduate students world-wide who was invited to speak at the 4th International Student Seminar of the 21st Century Center of Excellence Program at Kyoto University, Japan.

Thomas Danhorn (graduate student), Clay Fuqua, and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: Quorum sensing and motility mediate interactions between Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Agrobacterium tumefaciens in biofilm co-cultures.
[
abstract
]

Roger Hangarter's sLowlife exhibit is on display at the US Botanic Garden Conservatory in Washington, D.C. from October 27, 2005 through March 26, 2005.
[
press release
]

Yves Brun and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: Nature's strongest glue could be used as a medical adhesive.
[
abstract
]

Whitney Schlegel, Heather Reynolds, Briana Gross (graduate student) and colleagues have been awarded the 2006 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Leadership Grant ($30,000). The grant will develop and test a novel model of cross-disciplinary service-learning, promote new and integrative models for assessing student learning, and foster the development of learning communities that bring together faculty, students, and the Bloomington community.
[
SoTL award
]

Carl Bauer has been awarded a MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) grant by the National Institutes of Health, which will provide up to $5 million in research funding over the next ten years.
[
press release | IDS article
]

Jennifer Wagner, Yves Brun and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: A nutrient uptake role for bacterial cell envelope extensions.
[
press release | abstract | commentary
]

Lynda Delph and Jeff Palmer have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for the coming year (2005-2006).

Thom Kaufman was awarded the 2005 George W. Beadle Award by the Genetics Society of America for outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers.
[
profile
]

Armin Moczek has been awarded $540,000 by the National Science Foundation to continue his research into the evolutionary developmental genetics of horned beetles.
[
press release
]

Michael Lynch has been awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.
[
article
]

Richie Madewell, an undergraduate student working with Armin Moczek, has won the annual Genesis Award for the best undergraduate poster presentation at the Annual Animal Behavior Society meetings in Snowbird, Utah.

Loren Rieseberg and five colleagues were awarded a $5.5 million, three-year grant (estimated) by the National Science Foundation to identify some of the key genes that cause lettuce, sunflower, thistle, knapweed, and several other crops and weeds in the sunflower family to differ from their wild ancestors.
[
press release
]

Keith Clay and Jeff Palmer are among the 2005 class of fellows who will be inducted into the American Association for the Advancement of Science during the annual AAAS meeting 0n February 18, 2006. They will join other AAAS fellows on the IU Biology faculty, including: Howard Gest, Curt Lively, Mike Lynch, Val Nolan, and Loren Rieseberg.
[
press release
]

Armin Moczek on the November 2005 cover of Bioscience: The Evolution of Novelties, or How Beetles Got Their Horns.

Mimi Zolan discussed biological science as a career on JobTraks during the week of Nov 28, 2005. JobTracks is a radio program for high schoolers about careers and professions, which is produced by the IU Division of Broadcast & Electronic Media. JobTraks is also available as a podcast on iTunes.

Daniel Kearns and Richard Losick on the cover of Genes and Development: Cell population heterogeneity during growth of Bacillus subtilis.
[
article
]

Lauren Young, a graduate student working with Heather Reynolds, is one of two 2006 recipients of the Ecological Society of America Graduate Student Policy Award. She will be going to Capitol Hill in March to learn first hand about federal funding and its impact on the sciences.

Indiana University will use $53 million Lilly Endowment grant to boost life sciences in Indiana.
[
press release
]

NSF has awarded David Kehoe, and George Weinstock of the Baylor College of Medicine, over $550,000 to sequence the entire genome of the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon, a prokaryote that has color vision.
[
press release
]

Roger Hangarter is creating a video from his plant and plant cell movies that will accompany a dance choreographed by Iris Rosa, director of the African American Dance Company, entitled "Rooted, Grounded and Manifested". The dance will be part of a show being put on by the IU African American Arts Institute on Saturday, April 9, 2005 at the Buskirk Chumley Theater in downtown Bloomington.

Curt Lively was elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[
press release
]